The Ministry of Health (MOH) has launched an awareness campaign on patients’ rights to help them secure them under the title “It’s Your Right”. This campaign is part of MOH’s awareness projects that keep up with the Saudi 2030 Vision. It reflects MOH’s care for citizens; given that any obligation on health practitioners is the patient’s right.
According to MOH, patients’ rights in hospitals have been reformulated to be clearer and more accessible. Patients will be updated on their right in a creative, out-of-the-box and attractive way to ensure their full understanding of their rights when visiting health facilities. As well,
a video has been shared to update patients on their rights, in addition to posters which have attracted considerable interaction on social media under the hashtag #it’s_your_right.
It is worth noting that the Ministry of Health (MOH) has launched today (We all are responsible) Initiative, as a progressive step towards patient experience. The initiative is designed to be launched in various hospitals across the Kingdom, to bring different views together, to listen to patients, to enhance intimacy between service providers (hospital leaders) and service recipients (patients and their families), to make the voice of service recipients hear by officials, to identify patients' needs, to find effective solutions to patients and their families' challenges, and to activate the role of patient relations and rights across health facilities..
The idea of the initiative is to hold periodical meetings for leaders and directors of health facilities with patients and their families, to elaborate on challenges faced and medical services provided, and to discuss and find solutions by both sides, while setting a time-frame for implementation.
Accordingly, the initiative's mechanism features a periodic meeting every three months by all patients’ relations and rights departments across the region's health facilities, while setting up a leader-based committee consisting of: facility director, medical team, head of patient relations and rights department, nutrition and pharmacy, and support services.
Through this initiative, MOH seeks to secure a number of positive objectives, including patient's feeling of senior officer's intimacy with them, finding solution within the facility without escalation, saving time through speedy response, boosting service effectiveness by projecting it through the patient's view, as well as enhancing patient's satisfaction.
Planning to enhance and develop engagement tools with patients and their families is one of the key missions of the Patient Experience Center. This will allow them to give their feedback on the health services provided. Hence, the Center will be able to prepare and develop patient experience-related policies, processes, as well as tools to address patients' feedback and complaints. This, in turn, will secure satisfaction of patients and their families, and allow further consideration of their complaints raise to the Center, as well as notices referred by regional patient experience centers across the Kingdom, in order to solve them in coordination with all stakeholders in compliance with the adopted processes.